Attic Intervention

I know it might seem like we haven’t been doing anything on the house but we have. With any restoration there’s alot of research into finding materials to recreate original parts of a house that are missing or need replacing. That means searching the internet, hitting the salvage shops, touring older homes that have already been restored looking for ideas and all this takes alot of time. Time we really don’t have since we’re busy raising our 7 year old son, working fulltime, voluteering at this and that and squeezing in an epsiode of This Old House every now and then (incidentally did anyone else notice that the current episodes feature a Shingle Style house, uh-huh, that could have been us – grrrrr…..). So, yeah, we’ve been doing stuff.

Our next project is to have the master bedroom and bath insulated and sheetrocked. These rooms, which are on the 2nd floor, are currently loaded with stuff like doors, extra windows we never used (don’t ask), basically we’re using it like an attic. So the person who will be doing the work told us we needed to clean it out before he started. Those dreaded three words. I decided to deal with the issue by moving alot of it upstairs to the 3rd floor attic. And I’m not talking a pull down stairs, can’t stand up attic either. In our house the attic is enormous. There’s 3 sections and one section is actually a room you could live in. It has a real finished floor, a door, closets and windows. I’m guessing this room was originally used for unruly teens or maybe servants. We’ve been using the finished section also as a dumping ground for our junk. So I went upstairs, saw how much junk was aleady up there and came to the sobering realization that it needed to be cleaned. Step 1: I am powerless over clutter. We’re not packrats but we do hang onto things probably longer than is necessary. Like we’ve got a big box of VHS tapes and it’s unlikely, for example, that we’ll have the urge to watch Thelma and Louise on a VCR anytime soon. Hey ebay……..

This is the room that has the finished floor, 3 closets, 2 windows and a door. We must have been delirious when we decided to remove the crumbling plaster a year ago. It seemed like a great idea at the time but we never insulated or sheetrocked.

Check out the 100 year old hooks in the closets. These hooks are all over the house.

Look at these nice doors, one is the entrance to the big room, the other is a large closet. And the molding around these doors is nice too.

I did clean the attic but it was diry and tiring and I wasn’t very pleasant to be around while I was doing it. Oh, in the midst of my cleaning the wind kicked up and it felt like a hurricane. All of a sudden cold air seemed to be pouring out of the basement into the kitchen. I went downstairs and discovered the wind had blown one of the windows in and it smashed on the floor so I needed to do a quick repair job with some rigid board insulation.